Well my sports hockey, not basketball or football, not perfect itself but there is a world of difference, so the point doesn't really apply for me. Although I guess an NFL fan could say the NHL isn't a real sport anyways, haha. I won't take that from he NBA though!
Regarding DOTA or any of these 'MOBA's' I could never really buy into them. If you look at 'real sports', in the professional leagues much of the audience aren't active participants but rather are just pure spectators. DotA and LoL have the biggest viewing audience in e-sports, but they also have by far the biggest playing audience. How much of a viewership do they have that simply watch the games without actually playing? I tried watching a game before, even threw in search titles like 'best' into the youtube search bar, and honestly I'd rather watch an MLB game *ducks*.
But seriously though, if you don't have any interest in playing the game yourself, which would lead to an active interest in seeing how the best play so you can improve your own game, then the game is like watching paint dry. Like I can see the appeal to Starcraft, which I can enjoy purely as a spectator to some degree, but MOBA's by design are boring as hell to watch without a vested interest.
And coming from an NHL fan, why does it matter if e-Sports get considered a 'real' sport or not? Why can't they exist in a similar but different space? I said coming from an NHL fan because being the smallest of the 4 big North America pro sports leagues a lot of our fans take a great deal of concern at how we're perceived (or a complete lack of perception) in the US. It's strong in some areas, and overall the gate revenue I believe is higher than the NBA, but the national media coverage and TV ratings are horrible... that shouldn't really effect a fans enjoyment of it though.
